On its face, the New York City Council’s refusal to add electronic cigarettes to the city’s existing prohibition of smoking in public places is probably the right thing to do — or not do, as it were. Inhaling nicotine is currently legal, so long as the practice doesn’t put others at risk from its byproducts

The justification resorted to by some on the Council, that a ban is not warranted because the potential health effects of introducing nicotine into the lungs and across the blood-brain barrier are not well known, is a dodge, disingenuous at best, and quite shortsighted.

Nicotine, a relative of the deadly nightshade family of plants, is a powerful parasympathomimetic alkaloid - which is a fancy way of saying it is a highly toxic drug (a poison, if you want to be blunt about it) that acts on the body’s nervous system. It’s not something that is usually associated with better health.

So the Council’s decision is not likely to be the final word on the matter.

In any event it is not about the smoke — because, as others have pointed out, there is none. The cloud that emits from the sticks is water vapor.

There need not be any visible vapor either. That’s just a visual cue, a way manufacturers pander to those who are trying to stop using nicotine in traditional tobacco-style doses.

In furtherance of that regard, the glowing red light on the tip is a nice marketing touch, don’t you think?

Let’s be clear. E-cigarettes (the term is a French-rooted diminutive of electronic cigars — a silly name, if you think about it) are a drug delivery system.

The battery-powered devices are currently employed by nicotine users, many of them addicts, but there’s no technological reason they could not be used to deliver other drugs as well.

When smokeless cartridges inevitably become available (it is when, not if, for, legally or not, they surely will) to dispense the active components of marijuana or hashish or opium or heroin or crack cocaine, or any number of other respirable chemicals, the law can be flouted in public with impunity, because there’s no telltale smoke or odor.

How are the police or any of us to know — without greatly expanding the cops’ stop-frisk-and-test powers?

The question here is whether we as a society are OK with enabling, let alone aiding and abetting, the practice of drug use in publicly shared common spaces. (Let’s save the debate about alcohol for another time.)

Meanwhile, those who use the e-drug pipes should be aware, if they are not already, that many of their fellows, friends and neighbors and colleagues, may finally come to see them as the drug users they are.